- From: Etan Wexler <ewexler@stickdog.com>
- Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 05:04:41 -0500
- To: www-html@w3.org, Daniel Glazman <glazou_2000@yahoo.fr>
Daniel Glazman, not representing any organization, wrote to <www-html@w3.org> on 25 December 2002 in "comments on 2002-12-12 XHTML 2.0 WD" (<mid:20021218113414.88593.qmail@web20007.mail.yahoo.com>): > 1. I regret that a proprietary extension to HTML was not > standardized and added to XHTML : the contenteditable attribute. It > allows to make an element and its contents editable in a browser. > Simple, powerful, efficient and to be fair, very well done. This > attribute was proposed by Microsoft loooong time ago, is widely > used and I have always expressed admiration for this solution The 'contenteditable' attribute type is a kludge whose greatest service (from the historical view) is to make plain the need for user agents that can edit content in addition to displaying it. To write that an attribute allows making an element editable is only half true. Ultimately it is the user agent which allows editing an element. The user agent may be robust and powerful, allowing editing of any element or even of any content that it can render. The user agent may be weaker than that, allowing editing only in the presence of a particular attribute value. The user agent may be quite restrictive and allow no editing whatsoever. Microsoft may have proposed the 'contenteditable' attribute type a long time ago, but Web browsers that function also as editors are as old as the Web itself. When Tim Berners-Lee dreamed of a global information network that we now call the World Wide Web, his dream included read/write software. Indeed, he created such software on his NeXT box during that period (1990 or 1991, if memory serves). If NeXT had been a popular system, we would not be having this discussion; we would be busy editing Web pages from our everyday browsers. But NeXT was not popular, and the rest is sad history. I do not understand why, when a vendor has taken the trouble to implement editing capabilities in a user agent, the vendor would make such capabilities generally unavailable. Why should users rely on authors for explicit permission to modify content? -- Etan Wexler <mailto:ewexler@stickdog.com>
Received on Wednesday, 25 December 2002 05:35:12 UTC